World Professional Association for Transgender Health
The AFFIRM team travelled to Lisbon, Portugal for the WPATH 2024 conference. Here, we organised and delivered a symposium (a group of talks about the same topic) titled 'Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy and Psychosocial Functioning: interconnecting mechanisms' in collaboration with researchers from Melbourne, Australia. Dr David Doyle began the symposium by highlighting the importance of prioritizing social health when measuring well-being, and how this is particularly important during gender affirming hormone therapy. The 3 main talks included:
An update from Dr Nessa Millet on preliminary findings from an interview study where Nessa asked people how they have felt in themselves and in their social well-being since going on gender affirming hormones. Overarching themes discussed related to emotional changes, self-regulation, how people appraised the changes they experiences and the information needs they felt were important.
A presentation from Dr Margot Morssinkhof on a study exploring changes in emotion experiences after starting GAHT. This study looked at whether variability in negative emotions, meaning how much your emotions vary from day to day, changes after starting GAHT. The results of this study show that after a year of GAHT, participants on feminizing hormones reported more variability in negative emotions, whereas participants on masculinizing hormones reported less variability in negative emotions. This study can hopefully help inform trans people who start GAHT to anticipate possible changes in their emotions. You can find a preprint, so a preliminary and non-peer reviewed version of the article.
A presentation from Dr Brendan Nolan on his work investigating the effect of early access to Testosterone therapy on self reported quality of life. You can read the full paper which was recently published.
In July, Nessa went to Antwerp for the 2024 ESHMS conference alongside many other researchers working in health and medical sociology. The theme of the 2024 conference was Intersectionality and inclusion in health. Nessa took this opportunity to present preliminary findings on the qualitative intervew study through an intersectional lense. Her presentation focused predominantly on stories she had heard from participants where they explained how intersecting aspects of their identity (e.g., age, or being neurodivergent) influenced their experience of gender affirming hormone therapy. Nessa would like to thank all of the people who told her their story to make this important research possible.
In May, Margot attended the conference of the Organisation for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD), in Bergen. she presented a poster here with the results of a study looking into changes in emotion variability after starting with gender affirming hormones, and with this poster dhe won a proze! The visit to this conference was made possible in part by a travel grant from ZonMW.
